Category Archives: Climate change

There was a recent map published which showed population as area rather than area as area. What struck me was the juxtaposition of China and Russia.

Russia has 16.3 million square kilometers of land. China 9.3 million.
Russia as 144 million people. China has 1,415 million people.
Russia shares a border with China that is 4,200 kilometers long.

When China needs to expand guess which direction they’re heading?

We wonder about Russia’s vast military build up, maybe we shouldn’t wonder at all. Russia’s might to fight the US or NATO or the EU? Naw, they have a much bigger problem south of the border.

With global warming turning the Siberian wasteland into potentially viable farmland. That and access to the Arctic Ocean might entice a Chinese takeover of Eastern Russia. All them resources just begging to be turned into high tariff products bound for the US and elsewhere.

MTBF is a manufacturing term meaning Mean Time Between Failure. On average, what is the amount of time a product operates without failure.

In our analysis of the paucity of life in the universe, this concept — as applied to life — is less frequently addressed. But it’s critical to understanding why humanity is “probably” alone in the universe.

If you were an abiogenesis researcher trying to create life in the lab and one day you astound yourself and world by creating replicating, mutating life in a petri dish. You run out of the lab, shouting to your peers and head to the bar to celebrate. Meanwhile, Billy-the-janitor, runs across your ugly-smear of creation you left on the counter and tosses it in the trash headed to the incinerator. Poof. MTBF of your abiogenetically created life? About 24 hours.

As we investigate the probabilities of life in the universe, we must not only imagine the conditions that we believe are required for life to spawn spontaneously in the strange seas or tide pools of exotic planets, but we must include the MTBF of that life. If a comet smacks such a life-foundational planet every few months, wiping out Darwin’s crucible — over and over — that must be a part of our calculations.

If life gets started but the periods of prosperity are so short lived, despite the initial conditions that engendered such life, it doesn’t matter that such a place is ‘perfect’ to harbor life. A short MTBF will exclude it from our tally.

And it’s not just microbial life that we’re considering. MTBF of a society killing asteroid: 50 million years? MTBF of a super volcanoes: every 100,000 years? And my favorite the MTBF of a technologically advanced society, reliant on electricity coursing through wires, due to coronal mass ejection (CME): About 200 years.

There are dozens of other types of life erasers, each with its MTBF. Pockets of life must not only navigate such continuous disasters, but it must grow large enough so that as these calamities occur, the likelihood that any one catastrophe kills the entire genome of the planet (or the species) is reduced.

We look for the exo-conditions that we think are favorable to life. But we must remember to include the windows of opportunity life has, interstitially inserted between extinction events. What is humanity’s real MTBF?

In all likelihood, humanity has triggered calamitous climate change. Calamitous for us and millions of species that enjoyed the Holocene as much as we did.

The concept that chemical, physical, environmental changes, seemingly small and isolated that may provide self-propagating feedback resulting in runaway change in systems attached to or surrounding the original event — has been known for decades if not centuries. Remove a single log from a beaver’s dam and watch the water boil through the gap, weakening the dam, flooding the downstream dams which in turn overrun their capacity causing them to weaken and the cascade begins and doesn’t end until all the dams are busted and the entire valley is flooded.

The flooding of our valley, our atmosphere, with greenhouse gasses has no doubt started and the feedback loop is swinging into full volume.

Drive your SUV, and like the butterfly’s wings across the ocean, you start the trend, you trip the wire, you trigger the unstoppable. And once begun, the storm will rage until exhausted. In the case of global warming and catastrophic climate change — that storm will rage for centuries.

The chain reaction of increased CO2 causing massive heat, releasing methane from clathrates in the worlds cold oceans, which add even more heat trapping that then melts the Greenland ice cap which floods the North Atlantic with fresh water choking the Atlantic Meridonial Overturning Circulation killing the Gulf Stream freezing Europe, which then triggers an exodus to the south, overwhelming the Middle East and North Africa, and so on and so forth.

These feedback loops are everywhere and entangled beyond comprehension. Increased rain fall in some places leeches nutrients and degrades CH4 uptake, reducing a forest’s ability to fix greenhouse gases. The death of coral reefs around the world caused by heat bleaching sterilizing the area starving the fish in the area forcing local fishermen out to hunt other species depleting those, which then triggers yet more feedback regarding ecosystem disruption. And yada yada yada.

Soon though, today perhaps (or maybe it was yesterday), the camel’s back will snap. When it does we won’t immediately know it. There may be a year or three before scientists collect the data and point their finger back into history and say that right there, August seventh, 2018 was the day the threshold was tipped and we reached the point of no return.

The wealthy know this. That’s why many of them enjoin experts to locate the most stable locales, least likely to experience social collapse caused by the fallout of the systematic alteration of climate. Fire, flood, drought, famine, storms, bitter cold, broiling heat — take them all and amplify each by 100%. Or maybe by 200% or more. If you want to survive the next 20-50 years (or have your children survive) the wealthy know that you must have a bug-out plan.

Where are you going to head when you know, in your heart of hearts, collapse is coming?

I’m reading Light of the Stars “Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth” — Adam Frank.

I’m about halfway through and so far Frank has supplied mostly background in his attempt, I’m assuming, to present various models — based on our solar system’s mechanics and planetary variations — to determine the probability of exo-civilizations, in the galaxy and the cosmos in general.

Humanity’s existence and technological capability is dependent on a host of serendipitous “coin-flips” all landing up heads. Two of the biggest and most impactful are plate tectonics and the availability of a billion years worth of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuel.

Plate tectonics ensures that CO2 is recycled. (CO2 is fixed from the atmosphere as sediment and rock, calcium carbonate — limestone, taken below the crust, disassociated and then re-released by volcanoes around the planet.) Without this cycle, CO2 would stay fixed, the planet would cool (as it has done in the past) (Nitrogen and Oxygen, 78% and 21%, are not efficient greenhouse gases) and that would be it for Earth.

And we all know what fossil fuels have done for humanity; taken an energy starved species and give it unlimited access to millions of years of nearly-free solar power. Without fossil fuels, humanity would have killed off all the whales (for fuel), burned down all the forests (for fuel), and never seen the explosive population growth that produced copious ideas resulting in constant technological advancement.

Part of his premise (I’m guessing) is to determine the impact and potential mitigation of global warming during the Anthropocene. This unusual release of extra CO2 that is warming the planet is, as far as he’s concerned, a potential solution to the Fermi Paradox: exo-civilizations might kill themselves off by their shear size and impact on their planet.

As I read Adam Frank’s setup I thought about a strange “ready for fiction” story line:

What would happen if a volcano suddenly spawned beneath one (or more) vast crude oil fields? Imagine if a Kilauea sized volcano burst up from the sands of Saudi Arabia. The heat and fire would start the oil burning. Thirty mile-high plumes of smoke would spread out for decades. Nuclear winter would descend. This is much like what a super-volcano would do, but a smaller volcano would suffice to trigger the calamity.

This is typical, don’t you think, this reading of anything and the extrapolation of a fiction story from the material? The “what if”s. I thrive on them.

I’m not sure I recall where I found the site on which I built that, but, what it allowed me to do is drag countries around to see their relative sizes. (Alaska is rotated to bolt to the US.)

I lined all the biggest along the equator, from largest on down. You’ll notice that those countries managed to fit along the equator just as you see — end to end — all the way around. Now, wouldn’t that be a curious world to live upon; with seas between each of nine continents, and oceans above and below and of course all of the remaining 190 odd countries stuck to the tops and bottoms of those nine (lots of Africa and South America to distribute.) But the tops and bottoms all being oceans — just two of them.

An interesting adjunct to this sequence would be to compare the populations for these countries, given their general shapes, and line them up according to that metric. Hmm, I may have to do exactly that (I’ll hunt around). (Of course there would be countries that show up here that are not shown, vis-a-vis population rank.

I’m struck by the comparatively equivalent sizes of Canada, USA, China, Brazil and Australia. Within 20-30%, they’re about the same land mass.

Just imagine if we could terraform Earth to look like this? Before we terraform Mars, maybe we should consider doing something about living on what we’re not using already…

Humans have enjoyed a stable planetary climate system for 11,000+ years. In fact, without the Holocene we wouldn’t be here as we are, the dominate species. But the Holocene, if you examine its traits, is truly a blip (or non-blip) in the massively variable history of the planet’s climate. Humanity will NOT be able to save the Holocene regardless of any effort put forth to maintain climate homeostasis. (Note the ~logarithmic scale in the below image. The important parts, for us, are in blue.)

No one could look at that chart and not come to the conclusion that, “whoa, we’ve had it so nice lately…” (Lately being relativistic.) So, of course we want to keep our streak of good climate luck going. Humanity has never had it so good. But let’s put this into perspective shall we? Whatever humanity does or doesn’t do, in the long run, the planet’s climate will change. We can look back on our 11,000 years of spring like weather with fondness, but let’s be real, in the grand scale of things, shit’s gonna get weird — someday.

This might sound like I’m an AGGW denier, or contrarian at least, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Humanity is ABSOLUTELY the cause of the planet’s recent climate warming. And we will no doubt be the cause of the 2-4 degrees Celsius rise in the coming century. And… that rise will no doubt cause untold changes to the world’s ecosystems. But, only one without perspective could look around and think that what we do today, or tomorrow, or never will truly change the planet’s trajectory through its future history.

Sorry, but given humanity’s proclivity for really poor decisions, unless some benevolent globally powerful General Artificial Intelligence comes into being and helps us figure out how to build fusion energy systems, or rearranges the entire planetary economic system such that the current oppressive inequality gives those millions of hidden poor and starving geniuses the wherewithal to create planetary wide systems for energy, clean water and food production — well then, I don’t really think a little global warming will matter all that much.

But, to step back from that precarious, contentious edge just a bit, these thoughts are neither here nor there.

For no matter what you do, your impact on the Universe will be whatever it is you think it should be — and, more importantly, your choice of impact is what you will live with.

In the end it won’t matter to the Universe. Because, you know, nothing matters to the Universe. (And to compare your lifetime with that of the Universe’s, is, like zero vs infinity…?) But that’s not the point, which is, only those things that matter to you — matter. Epicurus – eat your heart out!

What the rise of the finance industry, and recent support by $trillions of QE, has given the wealthy is the threat theory that they must prepare for the next revolution. What they don’t seem to realize is that Americans are not that bad off — enough — to trigger general revolt. And will probably never be.

Additionally, and this is to article’s unstated assumptions and some comments, it’s not the lack of wealth in the lower 90% that causes the inequality, it’s the lack of the velocity of expenditures through the 90% that has exacerbated the inequality problem.

If the wealthy were to figure out that the dividends they earn from the investments they hold would expand greatly were they to hand out $1000 checks to every 90%’er in the country, they would be lining up to increase the circulation of funds. Think about it, pay a struggling mother, or a 20 something wage slave a thousand dollars, what will they do with it? Save it? Hell no. They’ll spend it like it was on fire. What would 100 million people spending an extra $1000 do to the economy? It would kick it in the pants. Profits would rise in the corporations where the money was spent. And the rich would get richer.

Decreasing the inequality, more equitable distribution of all wealth, will increase the velocity of money through the economic system thereby boosting everyone’s over-all wealth.
6/10/2016 2:12 PM PST [Edited]

Currently in locales where marijuana is legal the primary problem is the lack of banking access. Pot shops are cash based only which exposes them to raids and thievery. So the fact that the Fed still treats marijuana as schedule 1 must be fixed to really cure the problem in the U.S.

Additionally, why separate shops to offer this single product (OK, edibles too) for sale? Marijuana is a drug, so let pharmacies regulate it and sell it. If you want to buy it — buy it at your local grocery story pharmacy. There its quality and quantity would be controlled. Access controlled. And the taxes collected and tallied. It’s a drug. Drugs are sold by pharmacists. Seems pretty logical to me.
6/10/2016 1:06 PM PST

What’s that old adage? A camel is a horse designed by committee.

Correct me if I’m wrong (the internet is very good at that), but way back when, wasn’t the “corporation” originally a creation whereby a local government invited multiple merchants and construction agents to join, for a time, into a single entity — solely for the purpose of creating public works like bridges?

And could that work again? Collect all the interested, somewhat adversarial, parties into a single entity whose sole purpose would be to “repair a bridge” or “fix a water system” or “repair a levee system”…?
5/28/2016 10:08 AM PST [Edited]

HG Wells knew how to kill off an invasive species… Superbugs are just nature’s way of eradicating the real contagion (humankind). Now, this is one weapon that the super rich cannot combat with their money, “sorry Mr. Walton, sirs, nothing we have will cure you of your infection — you’re going to die just as everyone of your employees might.” Are superbugs the ultimate retribution, although a pyrrhic end of humanity?
5/27/2016 5:36 PM PST

>”Trump’s own real estate career suggests the rules that govern those deals are often negotiable; lending terms can be renegotiated when a borrower is close to default, for example.”

That statement is the core of the Drumpf financial filosophy (sic). Donut thinks he can simply renegotiate much of what is on the books, as far as financial transactions go, for a “better deal”. The guy is so full of hubris that he believes his chutzpah can tunnel its way through the reality of world finance — and come out the other end not stinking of the irrationality its dipped in.

Spread the word, Hillary is a plutocrat, no question, but better one of those than a financial delusionist.
5/9/2016 5:56 PM PST

No one tries to be happy. Either it happens or it doesn’t.

Causation? If happiness “just happens” (or not) then there can be no causation right?

“If I can make just one more person’s life miserable, I’ll be happy.” — Leximize
3/6/2016 9:35 AM PDT

Who’s up for a little Quantum Easing?
Big Bang Theory or Big Bank Theory?
“This helicopter, Ben, only has one control; lower or higher, I think you need a few more.” “Sheldon, try pressing that button on the dash that reads ‘QE’, that should put a massive spin on things.”
2/29/2016 2:19 PM PDT

Productivity measurements are broken.
Take the smartphone for example.

• “Deliver to me all the world’s news, millions of hours of video entertainment, instant communication with everyone I’ve ever known, the delivery of my work product, instantly to millions of people.” And so on and so forth. Take the sum total delivered service in that statement, dial back the calendar to 1950 and then calculate how much it might cost to provide that.
• “Deliver to me a ham sandwich.” The ag-corp complex has turned that product delivery into a fraction of its cost 20 or 40 years ago.
• “Deliver to me the latest best seller novel.” The comparison to 20 years ago is immense.
• “Deliver to me a new pair of socks.” Same thing.

True productivity is through the roof. What is NOT advancing, what is falling further an further behind is HUMAN productivity. We are being replaced.

(Matt, you polluted your article with a tangential reference to the Great Recession — had no reason to do that — you totally muddied your argument.)
2/26/2016 9:59 AM PDT

“Whenever we allow government to pick winners and losers…” And if we let YOU pick the winners and losers all we’d have would be monopolies. What would be more appropriate are better rules to ensure Koch Industries has to deal within the same constraints as every business out there. Campaign limits, lobby limits would be good starts. Maybe the 28th Amendment — corporations are NOT people — would help too. What’s that? I can’t hear you over the din of people telling you go to off fishing and to not come back.
2/18/2016 10:49 PM PDT

?Excellent information, thanks WaPo.
It has been established that experiences and memories, which would include opinions based on thoughts, are represented as actual physical connections of dendrites within the brain. One’s belief that the “world is flat” resolves to actual pathways in the brain which store this information. It is my belief that to change your mind — the world is round — is to force a physical remapping of your mind. And that this breaking and recreation of dendrite channels *hurts*. I have no evidence to support this supposition that there may be pain (or the facsimile thereof) involved in assuming an alternative opinion. But the physical remapping appears to be fact. That an actual physiological change occurs… must be significant.
2/14/2016 11:08 AM PDT [Edited]

3 LikesFood consumption drive-thrus are nothing more than a satellite symptom of an established pattern of behavior that has failed to develop with the times.

There is no reason for a large percentage of workers these days to DRIVE to work — at all. If you are an information worker — as most of those 86% most likely are, you should be telecommuting.

Information companies should be taxed for each parking space taken up by a worker’s auto. $10/day for every car that show up in your parking lot. Got 50 people driving to work to sit in a cubicle? That’s $500/day. That should be a great source of income for repairing our roads and bridges. AND great incentive to force businesses to encourage telecommuting.

If you sit at a desk and type on a computer for 70% of your day — you should work from home. Period. Time for US business to lose this powertrip manager mentality.
2/14/2016 10:45 AM PDT

You make a deal with the Devil and you eventually pay the price.
Let’s face it. Corporations have only one master — the bottom line. If you fall below that, no matter who or what you are, expect to get cut; downsized. There’s no spite in it. Only a seemingly callous indifference to the people who patronize their business.
No doubt some of these closures could have been eased into, perhaps transferred or sold. And maybe for little towns like Kimball, it’s an opportunity to take back their community from corporate greed and avarice.
2/5/2016 4:53 PM PDT

Can’t. Small. Talk. Is love humanity’s gift to the Universe? What areas of the globe might actually benefit from AGW? What three foods would you choose to only eat forever on? Empathy felt by pets, does it echo our own, supersede it or is it something entirely different? What would you grab first if an earthquake started RIGHT NOW? Are smartphones just a phase? Will we be using pocket Watson’s soon? Can’t. Small. Talk. I just can’t.
1/25/2016 5:25 PM PDT

Jonas and the Great White Wail
1/21/2016 8:58 PM PDT

If the Sol system is typical just think of all the planetary sized objects (sub or otherwise) floating around the Universe. It’s not just 5-10 planets per star, it’s more like 20-100 planetary-like objects.
I think that’s my major gripe with existence; I’m envious of humanity circa 3016, or 4016 and the access they may have to such distant worlds. The fantasy of existing in those distant epochs is alluring to say the least.
1/20/2016 9:55 AM PDT

9 Replies ?Inequality is a result of poorly designed rules. Change the rules and you change the game. Here’s a couple of simple rules to help level out income inequality:

Essentially, corporations must pay a tax based on employee income equality. The greater the inequality, the greater the tax.

Additionally, corporation dividends are limited to the inverse of their employee’s income inequality. As inequality increases the maximum dividend allowable decreases.

Simple rules that will incentivize corporations to ensure that their pay scales are as level as possible.

For a company that pays everyone equally, there is no tax and no limit to the dividend.

For a company that exhibits the worst disparity, a 500 to 1 ratio, the tax would be 5% of gross income and a maximum of 0.0% dividend. Corporate boards will be sure to make sure they reduce such disparity as they will be penalized for their ugly inequality. Also, all of the numbers will be publicly published so that severely offending corporations are shamed or coerced into complying as the worst offenders set the basis for all of the calculations.

The bottom line is create rules that anyone can understand that will apply as incentives for corporations to do the right thing.
1/18/2016 2:21 PM PDT

After 1B gross income the tax % would be pinned to 60%
Seems reasonable to me.https://db.tt/q8koefwX
1/12/2016 10:10 AM PDT

?Everybody is exhausted by the ultra-right and their 1700’s mentality about government suppression and conspiracy. Most anyone who’s banging the conspiracy drum thinks there’s a British invasion, one-if-by-land, two-if-by-sea, event about to happen. Jeeze, the President’s right, grow the hell up and get out of your backwoods mentality. ‘Merican’s will always have guns and there’s no way to deny us of that right. It just won’t happen.
Hey Snowden? The prez trying to steal our guns? No? OK then!
1/11/2016 4:28 PM PDT

?Islam, unfortunately, is a leptokurtotic distributed ideology. That is, the bell curve of Islam has fat tails. At the fringes of the distribution curve a leptokurtosis distribution has far more extreme events than a normal bell curve. Meaning that although there are a billion or more centrally positioned Muslims, there are also thousands more radicals, those who exist in the fat tail of the curve. Tens of thousands in fact. And a radical Muslim, again unfortunately as a reflection on the whole of that religion, is far worse than a radical Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, etc.
11/17/2015 4:24 PM PDT

3 LikesNow, how many people die from car accidents?
How many people die from toxins, both poisonings and septicemia?
How many people die from drug overdoses?

Each one is incrementally greater than the first. And gun deaths is the lowest.

Thanks Ana, great job.
I’d like to have your opinion on China’s expansion in Africa. Will African nations become the food and materials baskets to China in the next decade or three?
9/23/2015 6:15 PM PST [Edited]

The markets and the government has put the FED on a pedestal. The FED thinks itself a god while we suffer being its plaything. And yet we continue to put up with its impulsive whimsy. Gold, silver and oil all jumped today with the rumor that the probably of the FED raising rates fell due to some metric released. What nonsense! The FED has TOO MUCH POWER (and Wall Street loves it).

What would happen if interest rates were set on a scheduled rise up to some reasonable level? What if you could expect that next year rates would be 1%, the following year 2%, and so on? Would you be inclined to start accelerate your borrowing in order to lock in lower rates? Yes. Would you buy that new car or home now to do the same? Yes. Would you take solace knowing that your meager savings were now earning interest? Yes. Would Wall Street quail a bit, equity returning back to balanced levels? Yes. Would investments pulled from the markets then enter capex, expansion and growth? Yes.

?The FED always surprises. Why? Because the FED is a capricious entity with too much power in its primitive yet gross control mechanisms. The FED sneezes and the markets grab a tissue. The FED smiles and the markets starting singing.
SET EXPECTATIONS and take the flippant fancy out of the FEDs findings. Establish a plan and return balance to all the financial instruments. A simple obvious plan: 25 basis points every quarter for 5 years. No surprises. No impulsive market shocking changes. Just a consistent continuous realization of a return to normal.
9/15/2015 11:34 AM PST